Metallica…let me tell you the story of how I started listening to them back in the day. It’s entertaining and will give you a little perspective on my general opinion of them.

When I first heard of Metallica, it was back around 7th grade or so. I saw the album cover for ‘Kill ‘em All’ and I thought, “Gee…that’s scary.  They are probably devil worshiphers.” And that was it. I never listened to them.  I had no desire.  Of course, that was around the time my musical tastes resembled something like a single celled organism swimming around in protoplasmic glop.  But hey, we’re talking about a 13 year old kid, so you can’t expect highly evolved music tastes quite yet.

My next experience with Metallica was my freshman year in highschool. I was in a pre-algebra class, and this dude named Tim used to sit behind me and jam out to Metallica. Every. Day. He had a sweet mullet. He used to give me this super-creepy gap-toothed smile and say things like, “Dude…I hate math. But Metallica makes it better. Here man. You should check this shit out.”

And so I apprehensively threw on the headphones and was immediately assaulted by blistering riffs from “Ride the Lightning”.  My young, fragile Rush-soaked brain couldn’t quite take it. 10 seconds in, I withdrew the headphones from my head, looked at Tim and was like, “That’s really loud. And it’s too fast. And the guy is just screaming. How can you listen to that?”  He just smiled said, “Weak,” and put his headphones back on and gave me a a little close-eyed head bang.

The third time I heard Metallica, it was my sophomore year.  1991-1992, and that was when the black album came out.  I had heard Enter Sandman on the radio, and I was thinking that it was pretty cool. Of course, at this point I was full-on into grunge, and I was still thinking that perhaps Metallica was of Satan. But the black album seemed to resonate with more more specifically because the songs were a little slower and crunchier.  And it was pretty musical. So you could say that I got into Metallica at the point where a lot of people felt like they sold out. Fine. Whatever. But seriously….there are some absolutely rocking songs on the black album…specifically Sad But True, Wherever I May Roam, Enter Sandman, and The God That Failed.  And it’s produced extremely well. It definitely put Metallica on the map for a larger audience that couldn’t quite swallow the full-on thrash of the previous albums.

So I started there, and then I went backward. I went to Master of Puppets first, and found myself getting turned on by not only the extreme ferocity of the music and the lyrical content, but also by the fact that these guys were actually really, really good musicians. And that was important to me at that point in my life because I had just flat-out stopped playing baseball and was nose diving directly into band, choir, musicals, etc. at school.

Then I listened to …And Justice for All.  At that point I decided that I actually really dug Metallica. I loved grunge more…but Metallica was well respected in my book.

I was pretty happy with Metallica until Load came out…which is where the suck factor increased exponentially. What the hell happened? And then it was kind of like they tried to reaffirm their place by releasing Reload…trying to convince me that the new sound was kosher…and that was even worse. By the time St. Anger came out, they weren’t even the same band. They hopped on the ‘I’m going to downtune my guitar as far as it will go. And I’m going to be like Korn.  But I want to sing a little bit. And lets not have any solos because solos aren’t popular anymore. I’d also like to sound way overproduced.  And I want to suck.  Yes. I want to suck and not sound anything like I’ve tried in the past.”

I think I maybe listened to all three of those albums for a combined total of 30 minutes.

And now we get to Death Magnetic. Let me caveat this with the fact that my musical tastes have evolved quite a bit since those past three albums have come out. I’m not quite the angry musical angst loving fan I used to be. That said, let’s chat a little bit about where this album is in the spectrum of Metallica…

The good part is that it’s a step in the right direction for them. We’re back to these 7+ minute long opuses with multiple parts and some pretty good guitar riffs. James Hetfield has some of the best rhythm guitar chops ever created. And the addition of Robert Trujillo is welcome. He’s easily as nimble as Hetfield is on guitar, but I think he lacks the musicality of of Jason Newstead or the late Cliff Burton.  There are a few standout songs on there, those being The Judas Kiss, Cyanide, Suicide & Redemption, Broken, Beat & Scared, and All Nightmare Long.  You could say My Apocalypse is pretty good too, sounding like it was something that could’ve come off Ride the Lightning.

So 5.5 - 6 out of 10…mmm…not bad.  But overall…it’s not great, and there are so many reasons why.

One of the things that made Metallica the band it is is the fact that each musician contributed equally. All of the guys have chops and know how to work together. I’m not real sure what happened, but Lars Ulrich has pretty much gone to holy hell.  There is something…off…about his overall performance. It sounds like he’s struggling, really trying hard, to keep up with everyone. And maybe he is; he’s in his 40s and he’s attempting to play some pretty blistering stuff on the drums.

But the most dissappointing, the one I’m most let down by, is Kirk Hammett. This guy used to write guitar solos that people can sing. They were such an essential part of the Metallica experience. On St. Anger, the album was devoid of KH solos. This album brings them back…but they are soulless. Its sounds like there was no thought put into them. Half the time they either don’t quite fit, or they’re just sloppy. My friend Tom said it best when he said that there are a lot of notes being played, but he can’t remember much about them.

There is a lack of cohesion of the songs. If you listen to Metallica of the past, you’ll notice something of a theme throughout all of them.  It’s not necessarily a ‘progressive’ approach, but at least there’s a running idea throughout the album. This album tries to do that, but I feel like it fails. There’s a story there, but its not immediately apparent. A lot of it is cliche and hard to take as a whole.  And the lyrics…wow…some of them are just flat out terrible.  Prime example would be, “Love is a four letter word…”……..

But the main reason why the album isn’t great is because it all sounds about the same…not only from the perspective that the album itself sounds the same from song-to-song, but it sounds like they were trying to dig up the old vestiges or something they did in the past. I get that. They are trying to show they stlll have it, and that’s important to do considering how horrible the last three albums have been.  But they did it better in the past, and that makes me sad.

It’s so hard to walk the line of doing something new and innovative and musically fresh while making sure that enough of the sound you created remains intact. Unfortunately, Metallica hasn’t done a great job of that with Death Magnetic.

They apparently recorded about 25 songs, so I’d expect a B-side to come out here within the next year.  Let’s hope that if those tunes ever get released that they are a little more raw and edgy than what has just been released…

Interesting note: I’m not dead. I promise. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes I feel like I am at the end of the day, but I’m not.

Why, you ask?  I don’t think I’ve worked under a 55 hours in the past 2-3 months or so. At the end of the day, I pretty much want to come home and do…nothing. My general exit routine has been come home around 7-ish, either picking up food or cooking something quick at home, watch a DVR’d episode of Southpark (because for some reason, I’m on this big catch-up kick), play a game, read, talk to my lovely wife or something…and then go to bed.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Where did writing go? I’m not sure. I certainly could have squeezed it in there as one of my options, right? But I haven’t because I’ve realized that sometimes it’s in my personality to get really obsessed with doing something. And then, just as quickly as I am obsessed with it, I drop off. I’m the same way with reading. One minute I’ll be plowing through 1000+ page books, and the next minute flatline.

In this case, I think it has something more to do with the amount of working than anything. I just haven’t felt inspired to get on the computer and do more thinking. If I get on a computer after work, I generally just want to read mindlessly or feed my World of Warcraft addiction a little bit.

So what the heck have I been doing over the past four 3.5 months or so since I last posted?

Work
Work-wise, it has been pretty crazy as usual. There is a lot going on. I’ll spare the details.  But let’s just say that I’ve been working a lot. Did a little bit of a travel to New York and Costa Rica. During the week, I generally just want to come home and veg out.

Sometimes I think I’d love to have a job where the entire day isn’t spent thinking thinking thinking. Sometimes I think that it’d be awesome to own a Starbucks or something because, by the end of the day, you know that it is, indeed, the end. You’ve served your coffee, you’ve talked to a bunch of people, and you’ve gotten to come home to relax.

As it were, I don’t think I’ll ever own a Starbucks. Nor do I really think that’s a feasible option for me. I actually enjoy what I do very much, and will continue to do it for quite some time.

House
Being a homeowner is still great. We made a great move by buying a place that didn’t need a bunch of work. It has been nice only having to do small cosmetic upgrades. We bought all stainless appliances. We also got some really nice new leather furniture (couch, loveseat, and a coffee table/ottoman). Did a little bit of painting.  But that’s really about it. It’s great to walk into a place that is ‘yours’…your space that you have made your own. It makes it much easier to relax. I’ll have to post some pictures later.

Home Theater
Most importantly, the home theater setup is now complete, and that, friends, is freakin’ awesome. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s perfect for me/us. I believe in proportion rather than having something huge for the sake of having something huge. I measured out the wall and figured that a 40-42″ TV would be the ideal size without it becoming the centerpiece of the living room. So I went with w 40″ Samsung 550A and couldn’t be happier. It looks amazing.

My receiver isn’t awesome, but it’s good enough. It’s some model of Sony. It’s a 7.1 system,THX certified and gets the job done. I have a couple of larger Infinity front speakers, and then a Sony center, surround and sub set up. Again, nothing awesome, but it was made to be more ‘low profile’ and fit with an LCD setup which is kind of cool. At least it’s all digital which is what I was most interested in having. 

Of course, what good is having a nice TV without having a little HD action? So I used that as an excuse to buy a PS3 because it has a Bluray player. Which, by the way, if you’re going to buy a Bluray player, then you should just buy the PS3.

Of course, now since a video game system has been brought up, I feel obligated to talk about that…

PS3
At first, I was resistant to buying the PS3 because I thought it was far too expensive, the game library for it was (and still is, to some degree) poor and the Sony online network is nowhere near the beast that Xbox Live is. Now that I have the system, I have to say that I’m pretty damn impressed. Overall, I still think the Xbox is the better gaming system for the time being. But I can now see where they cut a few corners in order to get the thing out the door a year in advance of the PS3. 

To start, the PS3 is a FAR better built system than the Xbox. It feels like a very substantial piece of hardware. The first thing I noticed was when you are playing a game or watching a movie…it’s quiet. The fan on the Xbox is obnoxiously loud, but I guess I just got used to it. 

It has wireless capabilities out of the box. Xbox makes you buy a separate $100.00 USB device.

It has Bluetooth capabilities. Xbox doesn’t. That means you can hook up a keyboard and mouse.  Why would you do that? Well, there’s a built-in Web browser.  And should you decide to insall another OS (which I’ll talk about in a bit), you can take advantage there too. 

It has an accessible and non-proprietary A/V setup. On the Xbox, there’s a set of A/V cables you have to buy in order to use HDMI and get true surround processing. Sure, you can just buy a $20.00 HDMI cable and go from your Xbox to your TV. The problem here is that if you’re going to do true surround out to your stereo, that setup won’t do it. The system doesn’t pass through the full surround signal. So your only option is to run the optical out from the Xbox cable connection directly to your stereo and then run an HDMI cable to your TV…thereby separating out the two signals.  Seems easy…except for the fact that you can’t do that.

The regular Xbox cable connection actually overlaps the HDMI out on the Xbox so you can’t use it. The only conventional (note I say conventional; you could Macguyver your normal component…or analog…or whatever…cable connection to where it doesn’t overlap, but it requires you break the housing on it) way to do it is to buy a $50.00 HDMI Xbox setup. Kind of a rip-off.

You can stream media from a computer that is on the same network as your Playstation very easily.  I had it streaming music and video about 5 minutes after I got everything set up. It was like, “Oh…hey Andrew…looks like you have a laptop on your network with Windows Media 11 on it, and it looks like you have a bunch of music and video on it. Want to stream that here?” All I had to do was allow the connection in Windows Media 11 on the laptop. The Xbox wasn’t that difficult, but it definitely took a little more than what I just described.

You can, if you really want, install another OS on the PS3 in addition the PS3 OS.  Yellowdog Linux is apparently what has been optimized for it. And you don’t even have to hack it to get it to work; there’s simply an option in the PS3 menu interface that says “Install Another OS”.  Impressive.

And of course, the Bluray drive is what ultimately justifies the purchase. Considering that the least expensive decent quality Bluray player starts at $329, doesn’t it make more sense just to get a PS3?

Don’t get my wrong; if I were in the situation where I was buying a game system and my primary motive was getting it for the games, then I’d buy an Xbox…even if I had to buy the extra USB wireless dongle and the HDMI cables (which makes the highest model of Elite 360 more expensive than the PS3).  The reason why is because the overall Xbox Live service is excellent…far better than the Sony network…and there is a wider selection of better games. Sony will certainly catch up…but then that’s the problem, and ultimately the advantage that MS leveraged by releasing a year earlier. They may’ve sacrifced quality, but now they have a bigger install base.

The Post Conclusion
So my purpose was to just let everyone know that all is well and that I am not quite dead yet. Mission accomplished. More later.

.a.

Oh my god…I really would like for her to stop this madness. While I understand the principle idea of what she’s doing, she simply isn’t playing for the team, dammit.

Here’s a quote from the other day:

“Now is not the time for our party to have a dialogue about which states should count. We cannot move forward as a united party if some members are left out. I want to be sure all 50 states are counted and your delegates are seated at our convention. Join me in making sure your voices are raised and heard.”

However, earlier on, when all of this stuff went down with Florida and Michigan, she said:

“It’s clear this election [Michigan is] having is not going to count for anything. I personally did not think it made any difference whether or not my name was on the ballot.”

This whole ‘contradictory statement’ thing is becoming a pattern, and that makes me a little scared forwhat we might have in store if she were to become President.

Pack it up.

Some of you may wonder just where I have dissappeared to. Never fear…I have not dissappeared. I have merely been pre-occupied mainly with something I did not expect myself to be pre-occupied with…and that would be yelp.com

I think it all started when I wrote about Torchy’s Tacos. It has gone downhill since then.

For those of you that don’t know, yelp.com is a user-driven review site/social network that allows one the opportunity to voice opinions about places…doctors, stores, restaurants…to other people. The whole ‘wisdom of the masses’ mentality for the Web shines full force here, and I’ve been enjoying writing reviews of restaurants I’ve been going to. I figure that I do my fair share of eating in restaurants; I consider myself fortunate to be able to do that. I know some people have to really make the time and effort to go out to eat. Therefore, I thought I might knock out two birds with one stone and do some reviews so I can:

1) Write a little more because I sure like writing and…

2) Pass on my experiences to those who might be looking for a well-deserved night out so they can hopefully avoid the swill

God, I’m so noble.

Besides yelp-ing…I’ve been playing GTA IV…probably one of the greatest games in the history of video gaming. I say that with full confidence and absolutely NO sarcasm whatsoever. There is something pretty amazing about this one that few games manage to capture. Violence, insanity, sexual innuendo and general bad stuff aside, I can pretty much promise you there hasn’t been a more fully realized non-contrived video game character than Nico Bellick. He’s a complicated person. And he’s further complicated by what you choose to put into him and put him through. The stats say I’m approximatley 11% of the way through the game, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’m excited to see where it takes me.

And then a friend of mine at work got me started back on WoW. That’s all I’ll say about that. As a matter of fact, that’s what I’m going to go do now…

In the meantime, if you want to see what I’ve been writing on yelp, go here. You’ll hopefully get a chuckle or two…

For several years, I have avoided the Blackberry phenomenon. It’s a little weird because I have been known to enjoy the gadgets. But really, when it comes down to it, I’ve never liked the thought of being ‘connected’ and accessible 100% of the time. I’ve also always thought that a phone should just be left to being a phone. I don’t need anything super-fancy. It just has to be kind of cool looking and usable.

Then I started my new job where they pay for me to have a Blackberry…

At first, I wasn’t so OK with that because of the reasons stated above. Not only that, but I started thinking about ‘those people’ in meetings where they have their BB in one hand and they are half paying attention and how annoying that can be. I don’t ever want to be one of those people.

Now that I’ve had it for a several weeks, I’m actually figuring out that it’s a pretty useful tool, and if you use it right (like anything else) it can be something that increases your productivity and communications quite a bit.

I’ve noticed is that it actually suits my communication style a little better as well. I don’t like the phone very much at all. I make it a rule for myself to make phonecalls as little as possible, and when I am on the phone, I tend to want to cut to the chase pretty quickly.

When you’re on the phone, you’re on the spot to come up with something to say right then and there. When you’re e-mailing or BB Messaging or texting, you have some time to think about what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it. It forces you to be concise as well, and that’s something I’ve had to work on for a while. I’ve been known to send out some monster e-mails…

The only thing that I’m even mildly annoyed with is the fact that, when someone e-mails me or communicates with my via BB, I feel the need to be responsive. I’m a firm believer in the idea of unplugging and unwinding so your brain has a chance to recover from the rigors of a work-week. I guess I don’t have to be responsive 100% of the time. Nobody is holding a gun to my head saying that I will be executed if I’m not super-fast on the draw. I suppose that if you are 100% responsive, you are setting yourself up for some small amount of failure in that you are creating the expectation, the appearance, that it’s just fine to ask you to do things anytime, anyplace, anywhere. That’s not fair to yourself, and to some degree, it’s not fair to the other person because you get it in your head that if you are going to be available, then they should be available too when they might not necessarily want to be.

In a world where things are becoming increasingly more and more ‘on-demand’ we need to be cognizant of the effect this has on our relationships with others. We need to be understanding that people are people are people, and that just because they have the tools to be reachable 24/7, that doesn’t mean we should abuse it or take advantage of it. Afterall, the world isn’t going to end if that Sujnday e-mail isn’t sent until Monday. Or maybe it’s that you can choose to send out the e-mail, but don’t unfairly expect a response if until a reasonable hour.

So for now, I’ll view it as a nice tool that my company has bestowed upon me and hope that everyone is just as thoughtful as I will try to be when it comes to a reasonable amount of communication.